如此迷恋诗歌一定是极好的
你爱生活于此，呼吸于此，思考没有它的每一刻
浪费片刻除了写它，读它，什么都不想做，
为朋友和爱人朗诵它，你的一生中只有这一使命
那一定是美妙的，这奇特的目的和追求
或许是糟糕的，尽管一位朋友
在剑桥的午餐上曾经暗示过我，整个过程
没吃其他东西只吃着冰激凌，或许继续待在
这样拘束的一餐上是糟糕的，即使语言的美和语言的快乐都
自然滋长，我认为在这个西弗吉尼亚的美丽的早晨
我应该和那些认为它糟糕的很的人站在一起
紫色的野豌豆，马齿苋，燕草和风铃草的花
开得非常欢，想要永恒地把一切变成诗，不是简单地承认
这神圣的时刻为神圣，亵渎其周期作为亵渎一定是可怕的，
哦，一个人可能因吃太多的冰淇淋变胖
堵塞血管，腰围扩大，呼吸
变成越来越短的喘息
直到你死于此，只留下希望
你至少想要能够掌握这种散文的艺术。
It must be wonderful to be so obsessed with poetry
that you live it, breathe it, consider every moment without it
a moment wasted want to do nothing else but write it, read it,
recite it to your friends and lovers it must be wonderful
to have only this one mission for your life, this singular sense
of purpose and pursuit, or perhaps it’s terrible, as a friend
once suggested to me over lunch in Cambridge, eating nothing
but ice cream all the time, perhaps it’s awful to live on
so restricted a diet even of beauty and pleasure even of language
outgrowing itself I think I might side with those who think
it’s terrible on this beautiful morning in West Virginia, with
the purple vetch and spring beauties and larkspur and bluebells
blossoming so perfectly, it must be horrible to want to go
perpetually turning everything into poetry to not simply allow
the sacred its moment as the sacred, the profane its tenure
as the profane oh one can get so fat from eating too much ice cream,
the arteries clogging, the waistline expanding the breath coming
in shorter and shorter gasps until you die of it and are left wishing
you’d at least been able to master the art of prose.
